Free Republic

For the prime of a short man's life - Napoleon is the model here again - his shortness is not thematised at all. On horseback in the paintings by David or the Baron Gros, or enthroned by Ingres, Napoleon may look moon-faced, and the little ringlet that dangles above his eye may seem dandyish, but the last thing he looks is short. It is only later on Elba and St Helena that his diminutive stature becomes part of his self-knowledge. The true Napoleonic moment is when age and circumstances conspire to remind the short man of his stature. It was...

Last week’s saber rattling by Hugo Chavez, a blunt threat to remove the Dutch from the Netherlands Antilles islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao, clearly demonstrates the existence of a misguided national policy that can only result in an armed conflict in the Caribbean. The fabricated territorial and maritime claims against the Netherlands by the current Venezuelan government are certainly a recipe for disaster. But by also seeking to expel what he refers to as the other “colonial powers” of France, the United Kingdom and the United States from their possessions in the Western Hemisphere, he risks armed confrontation with...

An unfortunate byproduct of George W. Bush's political strategy is that his success has depended on moving the base of the Republican Party down into a demographic that should by all rights be Democratic. That's right, I'm talking about the moron vote. This was best illustrated by that recent incident in Fallujah in which a cameraman caught on tape the shooting of an Iraqi prisoner by a U.S. Marine. The Marine apparently presumed the Iraqi was pretending to be dead for the purpose of preparing a later ambush. Now the Marine has been removed from duty and may be court-martialed....